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It appears as if the alarmists have got wrong on coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. It is pity Prof Bob Carter could not be around to see this. Maybe Peter Rid will get his job back at the James Cook University as he is vindicated by this study.

The record temperatures that have swept across the UK this summer are set to continue into October, potentially having a monumental impact to the country’s wind industry. Last month wind generated power was down by an average of 20%, according to weather data company Vaisala OYJ, with wind speeds in some parts of Europe down throughout 2018.

Smallest transistor worldwide switches current with a single atom in solid electrolyte
August 16, 2018, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

The single-atom transistor works at room temperature and consumes very little energy, which opens up entirely new perspectives for information technology.
. . .
“This quantum electronics element enables switching energies smaller than those of conventional silicon technologies by a factor of 10,000,” says physicist and nanotechnology expert Schimmel.

Judith Curry writes:
My article Predictability of Atlantic Hurricanes has been published in the Cayman Financial Review

[this is a small extract from the article]
2018 Atlantic hurricane season

The recent tropic Pacific Ocean La Niña event is now over; the tropical Pacific is trending to neutral with an El Niño watch underway. Sea surface temperatures in the subtropical Atlantic are presently the lowest that have been seen since 1982. For the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, many forecasters who predicted a normal or active season previously are now lowering their forecasts, considering the trend towards El Niño and the cool temperatures observed in the tropical Atlantic.

Based on the overall expectations for low Atlantic hurricane activity in 2018, combined with forecasts of a U.S. landfall ranging from 50 to 100 percent, we can expect 2018 to be a year with smaller economic loss from landfalling hurricanes relative to the average.

Looking at longer time horizons, there is a potential game-changer in play – a possible shift to the cold phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation that would herald multiple decades of suppressed Atlantic hurricane activity that would have a substantial impact on reduced landfalls, particularly in Florida. [bold added]

Blocks often, but not always, exhibit a large anticyclonic anomaly and reverse the zonal flow such that net easterly winds are seen in some part of the blocked region. By disrupting the usual westerly flow for an extended period such as a week or even longer, these events are often associated with regional extreme weather, from heatwaves in summer to severe cold in winter.
. . .
This short review does not attempt to provide a complete overview of all aspects of blocking, but is instead focused on the projected changes in blocking occurrence and characteristics under climate change scenarios and the factors which directly relate to these.
. . .
Given the level of natural variability, it is perhaps not surprising that no fully consistent long-term trends in blocking have yet emerged in observations. Given the importance of natural variability for mid-latitude circulation in general [148], it is likely that this will continue to play a leading role in blocking variations over the coming few decades.

Steve The Weird ‘Aurora’ Is Not What We Thought It Was
Steve is an impostor.

MICHELLE STARR 21 AUG 2018Well, well, well. Looks like the jig is up. The “new kind of aurora” discovered earlier this year, and subsequently named “STEVE” (if that is even its real name) has been rumbled. It seems Steve isn’t an aurora after all.

A YouTube video making the rounds on social media (with over 27 million views!) describes a system of small wind turbines placed in the median between two lanes of traffic. The wind generated by the traffic spins the turbine blades and generates (a very small amount of) electricity:

The question is, does such a system recapture energy that would have been lost anyway?

Again like climate science – assuming they know the truth before the work has started. If you already know the answer, why waste time and money investigating the question? The in-built bias is hilarious.

A University in Sweden has set up what it claims is the “world’s first global research network looking into climate change denial.” Chalmers University of Technology is seeking to explore “connections between conservatism, xenophobia, and climate change denial.” The apparently well-funded research effort ” will examine the ideas and interests behind climate change denial, with a particular focus on right-wing nationalism, extractive industries, and conservative think tanks.”

The project is a multi-year, interdisciplinary and international project, which is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency.

Consumer shifts to light trucks for the US outside California was even more pronounced, accounting for 69.6% of new light vehicle sales in this quarter.

The potential for California’s ZEV policies to have much of an effect beyond its borders are increasingly limited as a consequence, as few models are being offered for the types of vehicles consumers prefer to buy, according to the report.

The EU’s biofuel policy was meant to help the climate. Instead it’s been linked to loss of rainforest because of its reliance on palm oil. New rules aim to phase out the oil but the problem runs deeper, say experts.

Study questions the role of lead poisoning in Franklin Expedition deaths
August 24, 2018, University of Western Ontario

In the summer of 1845, under the command of Sir John Franklin, 128 officers and crew aboard the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror entered the waters of Arctic North America with the goal of completing the discovery of the Northwest Passage.
. . .
Taken all together, the team’s skeletal microstructural results do not support the conclusion that lead played a pivotal role in the loss of Franklin and his crew.

“The most powerful CMEs may travel at 2,000 kilometers per second, passing the Earth in seconds. We have discovered reconnection regions trailing behind a CME traveling 750 kilometers per second,” Jensen said. “This suggests that the impact of a CME on the Earth’s space weather consists of the initial shock from the CME and also secondary shocks from powerful electrical currents and accelerated plasmas trailing in the CME’s wake.”

AFP: President Emmanuel Macron suffered a major political blow Tuesday as his popular environment minister resigned live on radio — without informing the French leader beforehand.

Nicolas Hulot, one of the most respected members of the cabinet among the French public, took even his interviewers by surprise on the France Inter radio station when announcing his move.

“I am taking the decision to leave the government,” Hulot said, adding that he felt “all alone” on environmental issues within the government.
. . .
Hulot was left disappointed when the government backtracked on a target to reduce the share of nuclear power in the country’s energy mix to 50 percent by 2025, while EU negotiations on pesticides were another source of frustration.

On Monday, the cost of a hunting licence was cut in half to 200 euros — another bitter pill for the vegetarian.

It’s quite literally a story as old as time. Wherever you look in the cosmos, things don’t seem to add up. Our human observations of the universe’s structure—as far back as we can observe—suggest that there’s around five times more mass than we see in the galaxies, stars, dust, planets, brown dwarfs, and black holes that telescopes have observed directly. We call this mystery mass, or the mystery as a whole, “dark matter.”

El Niño and the Southern Oscillation, also known as ENSO is a periodic fluctuation in sea surface temperature (El Niño) and the air pressure of the overlying atmosphere (Southern Oscillation) across the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
. . .
The strengthening and weakening of the trade winds is a function of changes in the pressure gradient of the atmosphere over the tropical Pacific. Ironically, the warming of the sea surface works to decrease the atmospheric pressure above it by transfering more heat to the atmosphere and making it more buoyant. So, in summary, the pressure gradient affects the sea surface temperatures, and the sea surface temperatures affect the pressure gradient. [bold added]

A European Commission plan to abolish daylight savings time in the EU may create a “time border” in Northern Ireland after Brexit.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, announced on Friday that his officials would put forward a bill abolishing the clock change “Millions,” he said, “believe that summertime should be all the time.”

If Ireland agrees to the change, observers believe Northern Ireland could be forced to follow suit, which could mean Belfast and London operating on an hours difference for seven months of the year. Alternately, Northern Ireland and Ireland could be on different times, which could conceivably wreak havoc and confusion over the porous Irish border.

The heat really set in during the second week in June, when Springfield, Missouri began a sequence of fifty days with a lowest maximum of 83 °F (28.3 °C) and an average of 93 °F (33.9 °C). It intensified and spread from June 25, when Philadelphia began twelve consecutive days above 90 °F (32.2 °C) – a record it would not surpass until 1953. Some days in Philadelphia and nearby Wilmington, Delaware got as hot as 109 °F or 42.8 °C.
. . .
July 1901 was the hottest month over the contiguous United States until the 1930s, and is currently surpassed only by the Julys of 1931, 1934, 1936 and 2012. It remains the hottest month on record in Kentucky and West Virginia.
. . .
In the most extensive study of American heatwaves, it was estimated that the 1901 eastern heatwave had claimed the lives of 9,500 people, which makes it easily the most destructive disaster of its type in US history.

Green MEP Molly Scott Cato said their choice of Agnew, a Norfolk farmer, as parliamentary rapporteur by the agriculture committee, was a “truly scandalous” fiasco that illustrated a growing populist threat. A rapporteur is elected to shepherd EU proposals through the European parliament and, after negotiations with the European commission and EU states, into law.

New imagery solves mystery of why Mount St. Helens is out of line with other volcanoes
September 4, 2018, Oregon State University

A giant subsurface rock formation some 20-30 miles in diameter, known as the Spirit Lake batholith, appears to have diverted magma and partially melted rock outside of the arc and to the west, forming the region’s most active volcano.

Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 18% since 2015:

Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth’s magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation.

ITV REPORT 6 September 2018
The world’s largest working offshore wind farm opens in the North West

The Walney Extension, a Danish-led and funded project in the Irish Sea off Cumbria, has 87 turbines – each around twice the height of Big Ben, standing approximately 190 metres high. The windfarm is nearly 12 miles off Walney Island, Barrow-in-Furness, and covers an area of 145 square kilometres – equal to an area of around 20,000 football pitches.

Scientists recently mapped Jupiter’s magnetic field at four depths, and noticed a strange hemispheric dichotomy: The northern hemisphere’s magnetic field was nothing like the southern hemisphere’s.

“It’s a baffling puzzle,” the study’s first author, Harvard Ph.D student Kimberly Moore, told Gizmodo. “Why is it so complicated in the northern hemisphere but so simple in the southern hemisphere?”
. . .
The “unexpected discovery of the northern hemisphere flux band, ‘Great Blue Spot’, and predominantly dipolar southern hemisphere challenge existing dynamo models, which means we have more to learn.”

“This year’s ice conditions in the area are proving to be quite different from previous years; the current conditions in the Victoria and James Ross Straits are such that unfortunately, no ordinary ship can sail through the area”, the company said, in a prepared statement.

Chorus waves can be converted to sound. The ones around Earth sound like singing or chirping birds. Jupiter has stronger chorus waves, and now its large moon – Ganymede – has been found to have chorus waves a million times stronger than Jupiter’s.

It may still be summer, but communities in western Alberta are being told to hunker down for a blast of wintry weather.

A snowstorm is expected to whip into the province later this week. On Monday, Environment Canada issued a special weather statement for areas including Jasper, Grande Prairie, Nordegg and Rocky Mountain House.

A cold north wind is to blame for the incoming blizzard.

Weather that is decidedly more like winter than summer.
– Environment Canada

U.S. Becomes World’s Largest Crude Oil Producer and Department of Energy Authorizes Short Term Natural Gas Exports
SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

In February, U.S. crude oil production exceeded that of Saudi Arabia for the first time in more than two decades. In June and August, the United States surpassed Russia in crude oil production for the first time since February 1999.

This week in climate has been somewhat crazier than most. Based on Florence, the usual suspects are claiming that hurricanes are becoming more intense, even though they are not. California has decided to go full “decarbonization.” Governor Brown invited all his climate friends to San Francisco to share their “insights” with each other. And Al Gore proclaimed that “Decarbonization would be the central organizing principle of human civilization.”

Imagine how much crazier it would have been if the Democrats had won the House if the mid-terms had been held last week. Apparently there is no limit these crazies will not go to. They appear incapable of learning from South Australia, California, Ontario, and all the rest.

A HOLE IN THE SUN’S ATMOSPHERE: A jagged hole in the sun’s atmosphere is facing Earth and spewing a stream of solar wind toward our planet. Estimated time of arrival: Sept. 17th. Because the gaseous material will reach Earth only a few days before the onset of northern autumn, it may be extra-effective at sparking auroras–a result of “equinox cracks” in the geomagnetic field.

Tsunami Risk in The UK Is ‘Far More Serious’ Than We Ever Knew, Scientists Warn
An unpleasant surprise.

PETER DOCKRILL 18 SEP 2018

“We found sands aged 5,000 and 1,500 years old at multiple locations in Shetland, up to 13 metres (43 ft) above sea level,” says physical geographer Sue Dawson from the University of Dundee in Scotland.

“These deposits have a similar sediment character as the Storegga event and can therefore be linked to tsunami inundation.”

A Test of the Tropical 200‐300 hPa Warming Rate in Climate Models
Ross McKitrick John Christy

…we observe a discrepancy across all runs of all models, taking the form of a warming bias at a sufficiently strong rate as to reject the hypothesis that the models are realistic. Our interpretation of the results is that the major hypothesis in contemporary climate models, namely the theoretically-based negative lapse rate feedback response to increasing greenhouse gases in the tropical troposphere, is flawed.

More ships and more clouds mean cooling in the arctic
Date: September 17, 2018
Source: University of Connecticut

Summary:

Researchers recently modeled the future of trans-Arctic shipping routes and found that the accompanying increase in emissions may offset some of the overall warming trend in that region. Though the researchers stress this is in no way an endorsement to trans-Arctic shipping or a means to mitigate climate change, the results illustrate the complexities in understanding how human activities impact the climate.
. . .
Ship tracks form when very small, airborne particles emitted in the exhaust of large ships (and airplanes) attract water molecules, acting as ‘seeds’ (or ‘cloud condensation nuclei’) for clouds. Continued accumulation of droplets on the cloud condensation nuclei forms the thin, streaky clouds pictured in this [Nasa] image.

From oldbrew says: September 18, 2018 at 9:13 am
Quote: “Tsunami Risk in The UK Is ‘Far More Serious’ Than We Ever Knew,— “. Maybe if they looked further afield they would have noticed those same events world-wide. The Storegga event at ~6200 bce has a signature much wider. So is the 5000 (more like 3200bce). Those were extremely wild events.

Article 11 of the directive, also hotly opposed by Silicon Valley, would probably have a less noticeable impact on users, observers say, at least in the short-term.

The measure is intended to allow news publishers to make money when companies like Google or Facebook link to their stories.

Defenders of the law say bloggers and websites will be able to link to stories but that anything beyond a few words from the article itself will be copyrighted.
. . .
“If you want to go by the evidence, the experiments in Spain and Germany with neighbouring rights have been a total failure and I’m afraid this failure will just be multiplied on a much grander scale” [bold added]

The major beat periods occur at about 115, 61 and 130 years, plus a quasi-millennial large beat cycle around 983 years.. We show that equivalent synchronized cycles are found in cosmogenic records used to reconstruct solar activity and in proxy climate records throughout the Holocene (last 12,000 years) up to now. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612000648

The discussion on the ‘dust’ theory of ice age termination at Judith Curry brought a couple of other interesting papers to light. This has started me thinking again about how recent deep glaciations terminate. Such glacial cycles apparently now only terminate when the ice sheets reaches a critical size, especially at low eccentricity. Why?

Ralf Ellis proposed the build up of dust on the ice sheets due to falling CO2 and arid desert conditions reduces albedo sufficiently for the next 65N insolation maximum to trigger an interglacial. However there are other proposals.
. . .
So what causes the apparent hysteresis in the deeper glacial cycles for the last million years? Proposals are:

Using observational and model-based data spanning the entire 20th century, NASA scientists have for the first time identified three broadly-categorized processes responsible for this drift—contemporary mass loss primarily in Greenland, glacial rebound, and mantle convection.

What is Dark Matter? Even the Best Theories Are Crumbling
By Korey Haynes | September 21, 2018

Dark matter research is unsettling. Scientists were unnerved when they first noticed that galaxies don’t rotate by the same physics as a spinning plate. The stars at a galaxy’s edge rotate faster than expected. And their motion can only be explained by a lot of invisible matter that we can’t see.

That was exciting more than unsettling when the field was new and ideas were plentiful and had yet to be proven wrong.
. . .
Science is hard, and seen against the long story of scientific progress, we only started looking for dark matter yesterday. Until something changes, we’ll have to rest uneasy with the unsettling possibility that physics as we know it might be very wrong.

With regard to galaxy rotation, they should be examining physics as an opportunity to make a breakthrough instead of making up ridiculous fudge factors like dark mass and energy. There are some good alternatives kicking around.

The three-wheel Cargo e-Bike can carry up to 210 kg – including the driver – and can handle a cargo volume of one-half cubic metre. Equipped with a 250-watt mid-mounted motor with an automatic gearbox, it has a small turning circle and innovative tilt-compensating technology which always keeps the load platform horizontal.

Hambach Forest is silent with grief. After a video blogger fell to his death, the regional government has suspended evictions of activists protesting a coal mine expansion. Our DW journalist reports from on-site.

The graph below shows us the number of C, M and X-class solar flares that occur for any given year. It gives us a nice idea of the amount of solar flares in relation to the sunspot number. It is thus another way of seeing how a solar cycle evolved over time. This data comes from the NOAA SWPC and is updated daily.

One of the most curious aspects of the climate debate is that almost no one insists on mathematically rigorous tests of the major hypotheses that are involved. This is true among the warmists, of course, but is often true among the skeptics as well. Why the skeptics do not do so is beyond me. But most skeptics do not appear to do so. This often takes the form of endorsement of both natural and man-made sources of global warming, often with the view that the skeptics believe the man-made effects are minor. One of many examples is Benny Peiser, the Executive Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, probably the leading climate skeptic group in Britain. He has done many useful things for the skeptic cause, but endorsing the concept of man-made global warming is not one of them.

Using observational and model-based data spanning the entire 20th century, NASA scientists have for the first time identified three broadly-categorized processes responsible for this drift — contemporary mass loss primarily in Greenland, glacial rebound, and mantle convection.

“All instruments returned data that not only serves for calibration but also captures glimpses of what we expect them to measure near the sun to solve the mysteries of the solar atmosphere, the corona,” project scientist Nour Raouafi, who is based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, said in a NASA statement.

WHILE AMERICANS STILL wrangle their overgrown lawns by pushing or riding a lawnmower, many Europeans have handed off that responsibility to robots. These beefy, Roomba-like mowers loop their way around a yard, keeping grass trim and neat.

To many of their users, the bots are endearing. Their owners give them names or cover them in decals of ladybugs or bumblebees. But the sentimentality only goes so far, because these blades-on-wheels have also been slicing up something other than grass: hedgehogs.

Different spacecraft and techniques have measured different Hubble constant values.

“Using the classical method (with Cepheids and supernovae) we have a significantly higher Hubble constant compared to the measurement from the Planck mission,” said Prof. Pietrzyński, referring to the space observatory which ran from 2009 to 2013 and measured the speed from cosmic background radiation.

This matters because it could mean current theories of physics are wrong.

“If this is true, it means we will have to change all of physics,” he said.

A week before Jupiter’s perihelion (its nearest orbit point to the Sun) in May 1999…

The Day the Solar Wind Disappeared
Report date: Dec. 13, 1999

For two days in May, 1999, the solar wind that blows constantly from the Sun virtually disappeared — the most drastic and longest-lasting decrease ever observed.
. . .
Fourteen years ago, Scudder and Dr. Don Fairfield of Goddard predicted the details of an event such as occurred on May 11, saying that it would produce an intense “polar rain” of electrons over one of the polar caps of Earth. The polar caps typically do not receive enough energetic electrons to produce visible aurora. But in an intense polar rain event, Scudder and Fairfield theorized, the “strahl” electrons would flow unimpeded along the Sun’s magnetic field lines to Earth and precipitate directly into the polar caps, inside the normal auroral oval. Such a polar rain event was observed for the first time in May when Polar detected a steady glow over the North Pole in X-ray images.

NuScale selects BWXT to start engineering work to manufacture its small modular reactor [SMR]
27 September 2018

NuScale’s technology is the world’s first and only SMR to undergo Design Certification review by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is the country’s frontrunner to compete in the global SMR race, a market estimated by the Nuclear Energy Agency to be more than $100 billion by 2035.
. . .
NuScale Power is developing a new modular light water reactor nuclear power plant to supply energy for electrical generation, district heating, desalination, and process heat applications. This small modular reactor (SMR) design features a fully factory-fabricated NuScale Power Module capable of generating 60 MW of electricity using a safer, smaller, and scalable version of pressurized water reactor technology. NuScale’s scalable design—a power plant can house up to 12 individual power modules—offers the benefits of carbon-free energy and reduces the financial commitments associated with gigawatt-sized nuclear facilities.

Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica’s Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | September 26, 2018

But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have “large cross-sections.” That means that they’ll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side.

Before I show you the right answer here, I want to pause a moment on that “cross section” quote. Curiously, the New Scientist article doesn’t mention cross sections, but the article at LiveScience does. I say the term is curious, because these particles are supposed to be either high-energy photons or neutrinos, but neither photons nor neutrinos have a real radius in the standard model. Both are “point particles”, with zero radius. So what has a large cross section here? They use the term cross section so that they do not have to use the term radius. If they used the term radius, you might ask the question I just asked. They don’t want that.

Next climate alarm-fest starting – how much doom talk can you cope with?

UN report confronts nations with tough choices on climate

The world’s nations will gather at a UN conference in South Korea on Monday to review and approve a 20-page bombshell — distilled from more than 6,000 scientific studies — laying out narrowing options for staving off climate catastrophe.

A major early-season snowstorm hit parts of southern Canada at the beginning of October 2018, dumping more than 4 times the average monthly snow in just one day. The snow is now over in most of the region but more is expected in the days ahead. Below average temperatures are expected to continue.

According to Environment Canada data gathered by weather historian Rolf Campbell, the amount of snow Calgary, Alberta recorded in the first three days of October is more than quadruple the average of 9.2 cm (3.6 inches). By the end of October 3, Calgary has already had its snowiest October since 1961 and is on its 7th place for snowiest October since records began. [bold added]

The Trans-Canada Highway was closed Tuesday in both directions near Dead Man’s Flats, which is between Canmore and Calgary. Those stranded on the road estimated hundreds of drivers were stuck, both on the highway and in the ditch, for hours. Overnight, RCMP escorted stranded motorists to the warming centre at the Canmore high school.

Mazda says it will launch two electric vehicles in 2020: one a pure-electric model, and the other complemented by a rotary engine operating as a range extender.

The Hiroshima-based automaker says rotary engines are perfect as range extenders due to their compact size, high power output and quiet operation. The next-generation rotary engine can run on both petrol and liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

A comparison with ground deformation data obtained by satellite showed that the southeastern flank above sea level moved by a similar distance during the same observation period. “So the entire southeast flank changed its position,” says Dr. Urlaub.

“Overall, our results indicate that the slope is sliding due to gravity and not due to the rise of magma,” she continues.
. . .
“The entire slope is in motion due to gravity. It is therefore quite possible that it could collapse catastrophically, which could trigger a tsunami in the entire Mediterranean,” explains Professor Heidrun Kopp, coordinator of the GeoSEA array and co-author of the study. However, the results of the study do not allow a prediction whether and when such an event might occur.

Results from this summer’s drilling in the Severo-Obsky license area show that the remote Arctic well holds about 320 billion cubic meters. And the resource potential of the whole area is at least 900 billion cubic meters, Novatek informs.
. . .
The field is located in the mouth of the Ob Gulf, about 125 km from the new Arctic port of Sabetta. It will serve as resource base for the projected Arctic LNG 3, Novatek’s third natural gas project in and around the resource-rich Yamal Peninsula.

London, 12 October: Lord Deben, Chairman of the influential Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has been found guilty by the BBC Executive Complaints Unit of misleading listeners of the Today programme.

Commenting on the BBC decision, Dr Peiser said:

“We welcome the BBC’s public acknowledgment of the misleading statement by Lord Deben. In light of the BBC’s recently announced policy of banning sceptical voices from their programmes, there is now a growing risk that misleading claims by green campaigners and activists will go unchallenged.”

If the World Bank is so committed to ending poverty, surely it not be more economical to hold the event at a $59 per night hotel in Luton and use the money it saved to fund its projects?

Alas the World Bank, which prevented millions of people across the globe from accessing electricity with the restrictions it imposed on funding for coal, chose Bali to host the event — an island that will be heavily reliant on the use of coal to keep the lights on during the six-day event.

However, it is fortunate that the environmental lobby has chosen a country that has such a reliable power supply, so delegates can enjoy the event where “the luxurious spirit is extraordinary,” according to senior opposition politician Rizal Ramli.

Today’s German newspapers report on “Stephen Hawking’s Last Warning to Mankind”, pointing to the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit for signs of science and education being endangered. Science is facing big challenges from climate change, overpopulation, species extinction, deforestation and ocean pollution.

I am speechless.

Has he gone mad in the last years? Or has he never been such an exceptional scientist as he is being casted?

Tracking the movement of the tropics 800 years into the past
October 15, 2018 , University of Arizona
For the first time, scientists have traced the north-south shifts of the northern-most edge of the tropics back 800 years, reports a University of Arizona-led international team.
. . .
On a standard map, the tropical belt spans roughly 30 degrees north latitude to 30 degrees south latitude.

However, the new research reveals that from the year 1203 to the year 2003, the northern edge of the tropics fluctuated up to 4 degrees north and south of the northern 30th parallel.

What messed up thoughts must have been in his mind to conclude from astrophysical considerations that he can make any conclusion of something completely out of this field, having to do with a system of belief?

It reminds me of the Sowjet era announcements after the first cosmonauts had been in orbit: as they hadn’t seen God this was stated as proof that God doesn’t exist.

Dumb and dumber. I surely doubt anything he did in the last 10 years. Maybe a lot longer.

Researchers have discovered a strange, young “toddler” star with four massive planets in orbit around it. This is the first time that so many massive planets have been found in such a young stellar system.

Discovering a previously unknown role for a source of magnetic fields
October 19, 2018, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Magnetic forces ripple throughout the universe, from the fields surrounding planets to the gasses filling galaxies, and can be launched by a phenomenon called the Biermann battery effect. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found that this phenomenon may not only generate magnetic fields, but can sever them to trigger magnetic reconnection—a remarkable and surprising discovery.

The Biermann battery effect, a possible seed for the magnetic fields pervading our universe, arises in plasmas —the state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei—when the plasma temperature and density are misaligned. The tops of such plasmas might be hotter than the bottoms, and the density might be greater on the left side than on the right. This misalignment gives rise to an electromotive force that generates current that leads to magnetic fields. The process is named for Ludwig Biermann, a German astrophysicist who discovered it in 1950.

Figure 1: A cartoon of how the Biermann battery process generates a magnetic field. The product of electron temperature and density in a plasma of electrons (white spheres) and protons (not shown) is a quantity called the electron pressure. (In the figure, the pressure is highest at the upper right corner and lowest at the lower left corner.) Electrons flow down this pressure gradient faster than the heavier protons, generating an electromotive force (emf) over a closed contour (white line.) By Faraday’s law, this emf generates a magnetic flux through the surface bounded by the contour. (In this figure, the emf generates a magnetic field out of the page.)

Mount St. Helens was once a beautiful, symmetrical example of a stratovolcano in the Cascades mountain range in southwestern Washington, rising to 9,600 feet (3,000 meters) above sea level. Then, on May 18, 1980, the once-quiet volcano erupted and blasted off the upper 1,000 feet (300 m) of the summit. A horseshoe-shaped crater and a barren wasteland were all that remained.
. . .
The 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption was the most destructive in U.S. history.

Following the change in rates, the grant rates are now as follows:
* Category 1 – 35% of the purchase price up to £3,500 (reduced from £4,500)
* Category 2 – no longer eligible for the grant (was £2,500)
* Category 3 – no longer eligible for the grant (was £2,500)

Blasting the earth with radio waves and one possible future for the oilsands

Think of it as microwaving the earth: An old idea meets some new technology
CBC News · Posted: Oct 24, 2018

“The big advantage off the top is that we can do this with a lot lower cost, both operating and capital costs,” says Mike Tourigny, an executive with Acceleware who’s working on commercializing the technology.

“But we can also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We don’t need to use any external freshwater and we don’t need to use any solvent. So we’re very simple and clean.”

Simple and clean are not words we often hear associated with Alberta’s oilsands. But Acceleware claims its technology could address two of the oilsands’ biggest problems: the enormous upfront costs involved and the environmental effects of the extraction.

An ice-free oasis in the Arctic sheltered life during the last ice age
October 22, 2018 – 06:25

Researchers from Norway and the UK have found evidence for ice-free corridors in the Arctic where life flourished during the Ice Age.
. . .
The Last Glacial Maximum was a time when much of Europe was covered with thick ice, more than three kilometres thick in Norway. Ice stretched from the North Pole and across the entire Barents Sea and over large parts of the Norwegian Sea. This environment was not particularly hospitable to plants or animals.

But life appears to have persisted in long, narrow, ice-free gaps at the meeting between land and sea ice.

Astronomers find a universal correlation that could unify the study of star formation
October 25, 2018, Astronomy & Astrophysics

The researchers suggest a “bottom-up” hypothesis to explain this discovery and propose future observations to test it. According to their hypothesis, the correlation in galaxies and molecular clouds would result from the smaller-scale relation between the individual stars hosted by them. “After the initial surprise, the fact that what we observe in individual stars correlates with whole galaxies is what one would expect if measurements on both scales are correct,” concludes Mendigutía.

A team of Hungarian astronomers and physicists may have confirmed two elusive clouds of dust, in semi-stable points just 400,000 kilometres from Earth. The clouds, first reported by and named for Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1961, are exceptionally faint, so their existence is controversial.
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The Earth-Moon system has five points of stability where gravitational forces maintain the relative position of objects located there. Two of these so-called Lagrange points, L4 and L5, form an equal-sided triangle with the Earth and Moon, and move around the Earth as the Moon moves along its orbit.

HOW THE HIGH PRIESTS OF SCIENCE LOST THEIR STATUS & PRESTIGE
Date: 27/10/18 John Horgan, The Wall Street Journal

But physics, which should serve as the bedrock of science, is in some respects the most troubled field of all. Over the last few decades, physics in the grand mode practiced by Hawking and Mr. Rees has become increasingly disconnected from empirical evidence. Proponents of string and multiverse models tout their mathematical elegance, but strings are too small and multiverses too distant to be detected by any conceivable experiment.

In her new book “Lost in Math,” German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder offers a far more candid and compelling assessment of modern physics than her English elders. She fears that physicists working on strings and multiverses are not really practicing physics. “I’m not sure anymore that what we do here, in the foundations of physics, is science,” she confesses.

GOD did not create the Universe out of Mathematical constructs. Man did that.
GOD works in applied science,that which works. Men use mathematics to explain their Ignorance of the Universe. Small wonder they don’t understand…pg

E does not equal M C squared………… Even Einstein knew that. His wonderful short little piece of math was a concept to show that Energy was equal to Mass times a very large number at the speed of light. Squaring the speed of light gives a close enough answer but also gives it for the wrong reasons. It is the volume of the sphere of energy that is important…pg

New species of ‘missing link’ between dinosaurs and birds identified
October 25, 2018, University of Manchester

Dr. Nudds added: “Whenever a missing link is discovered, this merely creates two further missing links—what came before, and what came after! What came before was discovered in 1996 with the feathered dinosaurs in China. Our new species is what came after. It confirms Archaeopteryx as the first bird, and not just one of a number of feathered theropod dinosaurs, which some authors have suggested recently. You could say that it puts Archaeopteryx back on its perch as the first bird!”